TORONTO — Even as he decried Bruce McArthur’s record of barbarous murders as “pure evil,” an Ontario judge on Friday sentenced the serial killer who menaced Toronto’s gay village for most of this decade to the lightest penalty available to him by law: life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years.

Citing McArthur’s advanced age of 67 and noting that his guilty pleas to eight counts of first-degree murder spared his victims’ families a long, nightmarish trial, Ontario Superior Court Justice John McMahon sided with the sentencing recommendation submitted by McArthur’s defence lawyer over that of the Crown, which wanted McArthur barred from seeking parole for 50 years.

That waiting period would have left McArthur ineligible for parole until the age of 116, beyond his expected natural lifespan. Instead he’ll serve eight concurrent life sentences, meaning he could ask to be released at age 91, if he’s still alive.

McMahon said forbidding McArthur from asking for parole for 50 years would primarily have been a symbolic act, which isn’t an objective of sentencing. He opined in his decision that the “savage nature” of McArthur’s crimes makes it exceedingly unlikely he’ll ever walk free, no matter the date he becomes eligible.

“There is a fine line between retribution, which is an appropriate sentencing principle, and vengeance,” McMahon said.

“If the accused either had a trial or would have been a younger man, I would have had no hesitation accepting (the Crown’s) able argument to impose consecutive sentencing terms.”

There is a fine line between retribution, which is an appropriate sentencing principle, and vengeance

McArthur, a former landscaper who hid the dismembered remains of each of his eight victims outside the home of an unknowing client, admitted in court last week to murdering Selim Esen, Abdulbasir Faizi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Majeed Kayhan, Andrew Kinsman, Dean Lisowick, Soroush Mahmudi and Skandaraj Navaratnam in Toronto between 2010 and 2017.

Most of the men were immigrants of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent and members of Toronto’s gay community.

As he read his decision over the course of an hour, McMahon described McArthur as a sexual predator motivated by “warped and sick gratification” to lure vulnerable men to their deaths under the pretense of consensual sex. He repeatedly strangled his victims and photographed many of them naked after death, shaving their heads, placing unlit cigars in their mouths and dressing some in a fur coat and hat.

After killing each of the men, McMahon said, McArthur subjected them to “the greatest post-mortem indignity”: cutting their bodies into pieces and burying their remains in plant pots or underground.

“The ability to decapitate and dismember his victims, and to do it repeatedly, is pure evil,” McMahon said.

At various points in his decision, McMahon called McArthur “morally bankrupt” and said he acted with a “complete lack of humanity.” In committing the eight murders, the judge said, McArthur victimized the dead men’s families twice over: first when their loved one vanished and again when they finally learned the “horrific truth.”

“The end of the criminal case process doesn’t bring closure to their loss,” McMahon said. “Unfortunately, they will live with this nightmare for the rest of their lives.”

Crown attorney Michael Cantlon, whose prosecutorial team compared McArthur to Robert Pickton earlier this week, said he wouldn’t comment on the sentence, though he noted that the judge has his “utmost respect.”

“This is a crime of stark horror,” Cantlon said in a statement. “Although there can be no closure from a harm of this magnitude, we hope that these eight convictions for first-degree murder will assist our community in beginning a new chapter of healing.”

The sentence brings to an end the protracted effort to find and punish the killer in Toronto’s gay village, dating back to the creation in late 2012 of a task force to probe the disappearances of Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan. Although the men are now known to be McArthur’s first three victims, the investigation, Project Houston, was shuttered without resolution after 18 months.

McArthur went on to murder Mahmudi in 2015, Kanagaratnam and Lisowick in 2016 and Esen and Kinsman in 2017. Police first identified him as a person of interest when they obtained video footage of Kinsman entering a red 2004 Dodge Caravan — which they later determined to be McArthur’s — on June 26, 2017, the day he was last seen alive.

An entry in Kinsman’s calendar indicated who he had planned to meet that afternoon: “Bruce.”

Going off that lead, police eventually placed McArthur under recurring surveillance and gathered sufficient evidence to arrest him on Jan. 18, 2018, when officers saw him bring a Middle Eastern man into his east Toronto apartment complex — a man they subsequently found naked and handcuffed to McArthur’s bed.

“The killings only ended because of the accused’s eventual apprehension,” McMahon said in his decision, adding that he’s sure the man would have become McArthur’s ninth murder victim had police not intervened that day.

At a news conference on Friday afternoon, Toronto Police Insp. Hank Idsinga, who helped lead the investigation into McArthur, expressed his satisfaction with the sentence and said the odds the victims’ families will ever have to face McArthur at a future parole hearing “are between slim and none.”

“Let’s be honest here: I do not see Bruce McArthur seeing daylight. I do not see him in a public setting ever again,” Toronto Police chief Mark Saunders said at the news conference.

“He’s eligible for parole in 25 years. That doesn’t mean he’s going to be free.”

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